Trust Issues and More….

Hey folks.

If you read my last instalment, then you’re partially aware of just how messed up I am. The traumas aren’t the only thing that have contributed though. Not by a long shot.

I grew up spending a lot more time in hospital than the average kid. I have chronic asthma and wasn’t expected to live too long. For a while, there was talk of me having a heart-lung transplant if I made it to sixteen. I’m thirty five now and still have all my original organs.

Oops.

Despite my continued survival and slowly improving health, there’s a lot of programming that happens mentally to some kids when they’re chronically ill that still plagues me today. For me, because of the circumstances of my illness, part of it was a sense of not really belonging. Another part was, due to being treated as less than a person in a lot of respects, the idea of me being fully human simply doesn’t feel one hundred percent true to me.

These aren’t what I’m going to be talking about though.

I have some major trust issues. I am very good at convincing people that I’m open and candid and up to a point I am very much so. The thing is, that candidness is a misdirection tool. I won’t lie, but you won’t actually learn anything more about me than exactly what I want you to. It’s something that you learn when you want people to trust you but don’t want them to know too much about you in case they decide to hurt you with information later. For folks like me, it doesn’t matter if there is a legit reason for this or not. The fear is always there. When I hit sixteen and it became apparent to other people that I was suffering from depression, it got worse.

Now if you want to know just how toxic this can get, then read the next paragraph, but understand that for a few people (such as family members) this could hurt.

“I can’t trust the doctors as my health pays their bills, so their motives can’t be trusted. I can’t trust family as whatever poison is in me might be in them too. I can’t trust the people at school as they already treat me as an outsider. I can’t trust my friends as they already know I’m an outsider, so they must be waiting for the right time for something.”

These are the kinds of thoughts that hounded my head for a very long time and I still haven’t completely shaken. This isn’t because of any inherent fault of any of the people I’ve mentioned, but because of one simple line of insidious logic: If I couldn’t trust my body (because it was trying to kill me) and I couldn’t trust my mind, then there was nobody I could trust, was there?

It wasn’t until a young woman named Gloria reached out to me that I learned what it was to trust a person implicitly. Over sixteen years later, I still trust her. There aren’t many people that I do as much as I do her, even though we talk maybe once every six months or so.

Now, there are others that I’m letting in, slowly but surely. Giving them small parts of trust and hoping that they don’t abuse it. There are even a few spectacular individuals that I’ve trusted implicitly from the start. That doesn’t mean that the same dread of being wounded, or about being discovered isn’t there, or that the dread of the people I love leaving has gone anywhere. These are still major battles that are being fought in my head constantly and because of the downright insidious nature of them, getting help goes against every instinct I have. But for those people that I’ve let in, or found their way into my circle of trust, I’m doing it. Shit, I want my kids to know their Dad.

The posts that I’ve made in the last six months have been my way of challenging this. Slowly pushing past some of my programming and opening myself up further, despite the terror that comes with being exposed. I want the people that I love to see all of me, so I have to do this. It’s going to hurt and I’m going to fall down a lot while it’s happening, but the people I love, the beautiful people fall in love with, or those magnificent creatures that I fall into joy with are the perfect reasons to get back up and keep on going.

With all of this toxic programming keeping me in the dark for so long, I think it’s time to walk in the sun for a while.